Murph
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This is so beautifully written that once you click on it you'll be swept away and you won't regret it.
https://medium.com/@DrBrocktagon/it...s-it-s-an-innovation-opportunity-915bc058683b
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It takes me a few moments to recognise the name. I’ve arrived early at the National Health and Medical Research Council’s Research Translation Symposium at the University of Sydney and I’m sitting, coffee in hand, planning my route through the day’s program. A gentleman, quietly spoken, in a sharp blue jacket, asks to share my table. His conference badge identifies him as Glenn Begley. We’re shaking hands when I remember his significance.
Six years ago, Begley published an article in the journal Nature that was, in hindsight, a seminal moment in science. In three tersely worded pages, it ushered in what’s become known as the “replication crisis” — a growing recognition that many published scientific findings cannot be reproduced by independent scientists and may, therefore, be untrue. There’s a rueful smile when I mention this, a slight rolling of the eyes. But he is soon telling me the back story.
C. Glenn Bigley. Image supplied.
It begins in 2002 when Begley left Australia for California to become Vice President of Hematology and Oncology at biopharmaceutical multinational Amgen. He’d made his name as a researcher at Melbourne’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. Amongst other achievements, his team was the first to discover human G-CSF, a protein found in bone marrow that can be used to hasten bone-marrow recovery after chemotherapy. The move from academic research to industry was, he tells me, a natural progression. “I saw it as an opportunity to have a real impact for patients.”
Begley soon put his new team to work, scouring the scientific journals for promising findings that might ultimately lead to a new treatment. For each finding, the first step was always replication. The Amgen scientists would carefully follow the methods described in the journal article to see if they could achieve the same result. If they failed, they would contact the original researchers. “Sometimes there are tricks to an experiment that are not fully described in the papers,” Begley explains. If they still couldn’t replicate the finding, they would arrange to visit the original researchers and observe them attempting to replicate their own experiments in their own labs. When that also failed, they would quietly abandon the project and move on to the next potential lead.
The turning point, Begley recalls, came one year at the American Association for Cancer Research conference where cancer scientist Lee Ellis accused Amgen and other industry players of failing patients by making only incremental advances in treatment. “Lee was right,” Begley says. “But we weren’t doing it deliberately. We weren’t setting out to develop drugs that were only 2% better than existing drugs.” Stung by the criticism, he revisited the Amgen records, selecting 53 ‘landmark’ projects. “These were major, seminal findings,” he says. “The most famous labs, the most famous researchers.” The records show that 47 of those projects had been discontinued because the original finding could not be replicated. “I went back to Lee Ellis,” Begley tells me, “and I said, “This is part of the problem.””
More at link: https://medium.com/@DrBrocktagon/it...s-it-s-an-innovation-opportunity-915bc058683b
https://medium.com/@DrBrocktagon/it...s-it-s-an-innovation-opportunity-915bc058683b
--
It takes me a few moments to recognise the name. I’ve arrived early at the National Health and Medical Research Council’s Research Translation Symposium at the University of Sydney and I’m sitting, coffee in hand, planning my route through the day’s program. A gentleman, quietly spoken, in a sharp blue jacket, asks to share my table. His conference badge identifies him as Glenn Begley. We’re shaking hands when I remember his significance.
Six years ago, Begley published an article in the journal Nature that was, in hindsight, a seminal moment in science. In three tersely worded pages, it ushered in what’s become known as the “replication crisis” — a growing recognition that many published scientific findings cannot be reproduced by independent scientists and may, therefore, be untrue. There’s a rueful smile when I mention this, a slight rolling of the eyes. But he is soon telling me the back story.
C. Glenn Bigley. Image supplied.
It begins in 2002 when Begley left Australia for California to become Vice President of Hematology and Oncology at biopharmaceutical multinational Amgen. He’d made his name as a researcher at Melbourne’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. Amongst other achievements, his team was the first to discover human G-CSF, a protein found in bone marrow that can be used to hasten bone-marrow recovery after chemotherapy. The move from academic research to industry was, he tells me, a natural progression. “I saw it as an opportunity to have a real impact for patients.”
Begley soon put his new team to work, scouring the scientific journals for promising findings that might ultimately lead to a new treatment. For each finding, the first step was always replication. The Amgen scientists would carefully follow the methods described in the journal article to see if they could achieve the same result. If they failed, they would contact the original researchers. “Sometimes there are tricks to an experiment that are not fully described in the papers,” Begley explains. If they still couldn’t replicate the finding, they would arrange to visit the original researchers and observe them attempting to replicate their own experiments in their own labs. When that also failed, they would quietly abandon the project and move on to the next potential lead.
The turning point, Begley recalls, came one year at the American Association for Cancer Research conference where cancer scientist Lee Ellis accused Amgen and other industry players of failing patients by making only incremental advances in treatment. “Lee was right,” Begley says. “But we weren’t doing it deliberately. We weren’t setting out to develop drugs that were only 2% better than existing drugs.” Stung by the criticism, he revisited the Amgen records, selecting 53 ‘landmark’ projects. “These were major, seminal findings,” he says. “The most famous labs, the most famous researchers.” The records show that 47 of those projects had been discontinued because the original finding could not be replicated. “I went back to Lee Ellis,” Begley tells me, “and I said, “This is part of the problem.””
More at link: https://medium.com/@DrBrocktagon/it...s-it-s-an-innovation-opportunity-915bc058683b
and it is quite likely that if you redid them a third time, more of those who passed the second time may fail third time round. This says a lot about trusting slight improvements of things in studies.